Bernard Muller wrote:....
I also want to show this other graphic for clarity and the legend: ....
Your graphics are interesting, if a bit hard to read, but I think that, with apparently only one exception, they ignore one fact that I have been pressed to accept, nearly unwillingly at times: many of the texts in question are layered, with layers upon layers upon layers. You portray this in the case of John, your single exception, but do not take into account the possible layers in the other texts. (For example, who seriously doubts that the Didache is a composite text? I think Luke certainly is, though I do not think you agree; the gospel of Thomas has at least two layers, it seems, and probably retains a few sayings in their more ancient forms, as well.)
I once opined that, when you point to a verse, determine the date at which that verse was written, and then conclude that the text as a whole was written at that time, you were actually dating the materials
in that text, and not the text itself. I do not think you understood what I was trying to say at the time, but this is it.
A good example, just for the sake of illustration, might be Matthew 5.23-24: "If therefore you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has anything against you, leave your gift there before the altar, and go your way. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift." Notice that these two verses presume that the temple cultus is still operating; this saying probably originated, then, before the Romans destroyed the temple. But you seem to agree that the gospel of Matthew as a whole postdates 70. Clearly, then, the later gospel of Matthew (as a whole) happens to preserve earlier materials; but we cannot use those earlier materials to date the gospel of Matthew. These texts are layered, both (often) in a documentary sense and (virtually always) in the sense that they can preserve earlier forms of sayings and events.
I think you make that mistake, if I remember correctly, in using Luke 21.32 to date the gospel of Luke; that verse is a straight copy of Mark 13.30; its use, therefore, in dating Luke is minimal, at best. You might
expect Luke to have changed its wording if he were writing after that first generation had died away, and that is always an authorial option (as we saw in Marcion with the probable change from "this generation" to "heaven and earth"); but it is not the
only authorial option. Authors can, if they prefer, always keep the original wording and
reinterpret it.
And that may be what Luke has done with the "times of the gentiles." Even though "all things" are to be accomplished within a generation, the "times of the gentiles" intervene in such a way as to leave open the possibility that only the beginning of that period will fall within the time limit. It is similar to how Revelation 22.6 says that the angel showing John the vision was sent to show what was to happen
soon, when to all appearances the thousand years of 20.6 place most of the last two chapters a thousand years after the events of the rest of the book. A millennium later is hardly "soon". Yet, since the beginning of the millennium would be part of the events promised soon, that seems to be enough to satisfy the condition, as least from the author's point of view.
It is also possible that Luke himself interpreted the generation symbolically somehow, or perhaps as Jerome later interpreted it: to mean the whole race of the Jews. (Likewise, it is possible that the millennium in Revelation 20.6 is purely symbolic somehow, as well, and does not literally indicate the passage of a thousand years of time between the events of chapters 4-19 and those of chapters 21-22.)
Such is the peril, in my judgment, of using a quoted or plagiarized text to (help) date the entirety of the document in which it is found. YMMV.
(I know you have other lines of evidence for your dating of the gospels; I am questioning, at this time, only this single line of inquiry.)
Ben.